Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Collection From Existing Folder

And the reason that I wanna set this up, is because what I usually do from here, is I'll go inside of this one section and notice that inside of the library module, I have my previous import, right? I wanted to do this because it's gonna make sense more from a work flow standpoint. I have pictures that I didn't like, I have pictures that I did like, and then I have all the pictures. So I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna go to Create Collection Set and I'm gonna call it Seattle Shoot. And then inside of the Seattle Shoot, I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna make a collection called All Images. I'm gonna deselect that, and then I'm gonna make another collection inside of here, I'm gonna go Picked Images, and then I'm gonna make another collection inside of here and I'm gonna call this Rejected Images. And I'm gonna put that inside of there. I'm gonna single click on the grid mode, and then I'm gonna filter from here, all my rejecteds and then drag them in Rejected. Then I'm gonna tak...

e this, I'm gonna take my pics, all of this and I'm gonna move them into pics and then I'm gonna turn this off, set to none. And move that into All Images. This is the part where people in the chat are going, dude did I just watch the end of the class? (laughs) It's like Memento, this is gonna be one of those things that you have to watch backwards in order for it to make sense, but I will revisit this. I promise you this will make sense in just a couple of minutes. This is what happens. I'm going to get rid of this altogether because now we're gonna talk about collections and we're gonna talk about collection sets. And how all of that stuff sets itself up. But before that I gotta kinda tell you a little bit of a story, or walk you through kinda how I would do this. Let me go over here to my catalogs and collections and I'm gonna grab this one picture, oh this is also a really cool place where I get to show pictures of my daughter who's this little girl. (audience chatter) So now, she's nine. She's brilliant and I love her to pieces. But this was one of the first shoots that we did of her. So whenever I'm touring and I'm doing stuff, I always love this demo 'cause I get to see my wife, I get to see my daughter, it makes it a lot more palatable to be on the road. But she's pretty cool, she was pretty cute. and she was really happy. But don't sleep, because she also had to be really, she was a really, really good baby, but we taught her right from the very beginning. Now I'll show you that in a second. I'm gonna copy this picture 'cause I love it, I love it to pieces. I'm gonna make a folder over here and I'm gonna call it Love It Album. And inside of here, God, she's so cute. I'll put her in here. All right? But I happen to be a baby photographer as well, and this is a really good example of me being a baby photographer, I think, I mean it was fabulous, right? So I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna call it Baby Portraits Best. And I'm gonna grab that picture and I'm gonna paste it right in there. But over time, I'll also like to try to keep all of my holiday memories kind of in one spot, right? So I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna make another folder and I'm gonna call that folder Holiday Memories. Guess what? That was a great holiday memory. She wore the hat perfectly. And then you know, I have this series that I'm working on called the Babies in Red, so I'm like all right, there's my Babies in Red series. And I'll paste that in there. So I have a folder called Babies in Red, with that DNG file, Baby Portraits Best with that DNG file, Holiday Memories with that DNG file, and the Love It Album with that DNG file. This is how we normally work with organizing ourselves in our computers, right? Prior to, I think at the moment you stop receiving AOL discs, was when you started doing something past that. But inside of here, this is how we organize. So we used folders as organization. And I want you to think about it because that's not really the way you do stuff. Folders don't really organize, they hold. Organization is something else. Like when you go to Apple and you buy Baby Got Back, you only buy one copy, but you can put it in 14 different playlists. Like I use it in my sleep playlist, in my waking up playlist, it's just, gotta love Sir Mix-a-Lot. So I think it's a good thing. But here's the problem that you have with this. In addition to it being a poor way to be able to organize, you run into a couple of things. Right now you have one, two, three, four different folders that have four different files. That means that you are taking up four times more space than you normally need to take up on a computer. For one file. That's a problem. The second problem that you have with this, is that if I were to come to this Love It Album and I were to make this change right here, I would have to remember, that I have this in four other locations, and then have to remember that I have to go update those as well. Not really the best way for you to work. So in a perfect world, I'd like to be able to have a way to be able to organize how I see the information that I have inside of Lightroom, not have it take up as much space, and have it be smart enough to be able to move these changes when I need them. That's how Lightroom sets up collections. So think of collections almost like playlists for pictures. Right? It's a view of a series of different things. Now, let's go back into, so this way sucks. I'm gonna get rid of this. And I'm gonna leave that skyline there, 'cause we'll go back to that, I promise you. Inside of here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to take an already existing set of pictures and put them inside of here. Let's go to my catalog and collections. So I have all these pictures, matter of fact I'm just gonna drag this over here so I don't have to ever do that again. And I'm gonna grab this folder of pictures, oh this one right here, Sabine, yeah. I love that. You can grab a folder of pictures and drag them into the Library module. Like if you're just starting new, you're like my notebook sucks, I wanna get rid of everything. File>Close and you wanna drag it in and start a new catalog, you can. Inside of the Library module, grab the folders of wherever your files are, drag them in here, and notice that your option now is Add. It is basically the equivalent of hey, listen, in the living room there is a box of pictures. Please do me a favor, and write them down in the notebook. That's what that equivalent is, Add. So you're not changing, you're not organizing, you're not naming, you're just telling it, write it in the notebook. We import this. So see? Sad baby, cool baby. (audience laughs) Look at my toes baby. Happy baby. We train her nice and early. She's like, that's right. Uncle McNally. (laughs) He's cool, right? So now I have my baby's set up, right? She's all set. Now watch this. This is the baby picture that I like, that I think is amazing, right? So what I'm gonna do here, is I'm going to make a collection and I'm gonna call it Sabine Daddy Loves You because I think she's watching. So I'm gonna click that, and I'm gonna put Sabine Daddy Loves You, and it's right here. I'm gonna go to the grid mode, and I can just grab this and drag it over here. Now I can make another collection. Click on this and make another collection. All it is is a view of information, right? And I'm gonna call this Babies in Red. And inside of there, I'll grab that and I'll drag that in here. And then I'm gonna make a, oh that's not what I wanted to do at all. I'm gonna come over here, I'm gonna grab this. Make a new collection and I'm gonna call it Holiday Memories. Now you do have the option to include the selected pictures right from the list, right? If you click on that, I tend to not like doing that, because what happens is the moment that you do that and you click OK, it brings you into this collection which then means that you have to click back on the All Photographs to then scroll to the next section that you want. So it gives you almost, I like that it sets it up, but then you have to do two or three clicks to get back to where you were. So I usually leave it unchecked and then just drag it because then I can kinda keep working ad hoc. But is everybody okay with this so far? All this was, was just different views, different playlists. Now the beautiful part about this, is that if I grab this picture of my daughter and I go to develop, this isn't a developing class, but let's just say I did that. Or here, I'm gonna do that. Not because I wanna do anything with my daughter, but because I wanted to make sure that you guys could see that there was a visible change in what I did. If I hit the G to go back into the grid mode, not only does it change here, but it also changes here, and it also changes here. So that solved a lot of those problems. Your collections allow you then to take a whole bunch of information and you can just put it into different views. And it's still using the one individual image, and it's also keeping track of where all of those different things are. That's not bad. What happens if, like many of us, our catalogs are all over the place, and we wanna combine them into one, can you take all your catalogs and make a new one? Yes you can. You can import catalogs. In fact, I am not going to actually do it, 'cause there's a whole bunch of junk here, John. But what I'll do is I'm gonna show the process of what it looks like. It literally is a question of just taking one notebook and going hey notebook, here's another notebook, how do you guys wanna hang out? And you just do the import of that and it'll tell you that. It's actually very straightforward. So we'll talk about that as well. Great, anybody else? Here, yes sir. Just grab one of the mics and we'll go from there. All right thank you. What about the pictures that you've marked with an X and maybe you are sure that you don't ever want to use them, do you hang onto them as part of that 309, or do you ever just delete them off your hard drive entirely? And what is the best way to do it? You should delete. You should delete. The Lord you should delete. I try to delete. You should delete. There are times when you don't, like if you have issues, right? A packer like me, obviously you don't delete. But I'm trying to be better about it. About deleting most of it, most of the images as they come through the shoot. I see it, I select it, right click, delete, gone. There are instances however, where I'm doing jobs for clients where they don't wanna see that. They're like keep everything. And usually what I do is I'm like, well it's gonna cost you an extra $200 or an extra $300. Price of a drive, right? Always write it in. If they want you to keep it, I gotta store it, where are you gonna put it? So you definitely wanna write that in. We good so far? Kay. I'm gonna show you something else. I'm gonna grab a whole bunch of pictures inside of here and I'm gonna grab all of these folders because we don't have to just do it with one folder. I could just grab the whole shebang, drag it inside of here, sure I'll grab everything. And dear God I hope this works. This is my favorite, right? So she's getting baptized and I'm like oh that's so cute. And then the priest turns around and he's just like hey listen, when she's getting baptized, the photographer is there, she's like listen can you do me a favor? Can you take a picture of me and the baby? Grabs the baby, brings it into a light, and is doing all that kind of stuff and he's like just make sure that you can get a good shot, are you gonna get a shot? Are you gonna have a problem getting a shot? And I wanna make sure that it's in focus and it's right, and my photographer's like yeah man, I got it covered man. It's totally cool. And it's McNally, he has no idea that Joe McNally's taking the shot. And I'm like, he's good. We're okay, he's got it. So these are all these pictures. So that's my wife, Jen. And that's my baby giving her best, what's-a matter you? Gotta picture, right? I'm gonna show you a quick thing, so that's Christmas morning and there's a whole bunch of Jen shots and a lot of the times I like to do, now if you see me online, you know that I take stunning baby pictures of my daughter, Sabine. It doesn't always work that way. And I will not make her, but look she's crying. I'm gonna make it as small as possible 'cause I do never wanna show that. She takes great pictures, but she does cry sometimes. And when she does, oh boy. Now I wanted to bring this because I don't wanna just talk about my work and the showing and in all this, I wanted to have a very controlled environment to give you the concept of collections and collections. But before I do that, I'm gonna geek out. Notice right here, when you click on folders, the moment that you click on folders, folders turns up and everything else collapses. If I click on collections, collections turns up, folders collapses. That's called solo mode in Lightroom. Saves space, right? If you right click right here on any of these things and you select Solo Mode, every time you click on one of the panels, the other ones will close. And it's on a per module basis. So even if you do it here, you'd have to do it in develop, you'd have to do it in web. Nobody uses web. But you could do it there. Now from here, I'm gonna uncheck solo mode. This is the only time that I'm gonna do this. And I'm gonna go to this folder in the library, and you'll see that now my folders are all here. And my collections are all here. If you want a quick way to be able to take folders and turn them temporarily into collections, you can just single click on one of these, Shift+click on all of these, and drag them over here. You'll see that a blue bar appears at the very, very top of that, you let it go and bam. Now you don't have to look at your folders. All of them are collections. So rather than me making collections and dragging pictures, I was like let's just show you how to be able to do that. If you wanted to get a kick start on making the collections, you're good. The benefit to some of this stuff, or the benefit to collections, I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna call this The Best of the Best, and it's not true. But that's what I'm gonna call it. The benefit of this, the Best of the Best, is that these pictures that I have here with Papi, like get away! And these pictures that we have for Easter and these pictures that we have at a park are from a bunch of different folders inside of our Lightroom library, right? Some are in sub-folders, some are in another location. But I can grab this picture and put it into the Best of the Best. I can come over to Christmas evening, she's like what is this little house? And grab it, and I can put that in the Best of the Best. And I can grab the Jen haircut, that's my wife Jen. And I can put that in the Best of the Best. So the Best of the Best collection, holds stuff from different portions of a drive, different folders, that's a great way for you to be able to work. Now if at any point in time, I grab this, right? So there's the haircut picture. See that this picture is here. And it's also in the Best of the Best. If I make a change in this one file, right? A little bit of recovery, exposure recovery, it's been a long time since I've opened this picture. Oh so do you guys know what the difference is here? Exposure, recovery, fill light, why don't you see highlights or shadows or any of that stuff? So do you know? Can you tell me? 'Cause I don't know. Next to where it says original photo, there's a funny little flash mark, and that means it's an older version. Process version, you're really good! What's your name? Barbara. Come up here Barbara, no I'm just, no, no, I'm kidding, I'm just kidding. No if you look all the way down here at the bottom, under camera calibration. Inside of camera calibration you'll see a section called Process Version. Process Version is almost kind of like the recipe by which you process a raw file. And a long, long, long time ago, they used to have processing of raw files a specific way. And they had exposure, recovery, fill light, and all that stuff. So it's process version one, you're absolutely correct. As they got better, they came up with new ways of processing raw files. And they were like remember that one time when we told you we really knew what we were talking about? Well we didn't. We're gonna have a better way of doing it. This is how we did it. And then we're now up to version four. So when you switch to version four, that means that that file has not been opened since that time. If you switch to version four, now you go back in, and now you get exposure, contrast, highlight, shadows. So if you ever wanna play a trick on somebody, grab all of their files and switch to process version one and then be like I don't know man, I think you got the old high sierra bug. Just walk away. But so inside of here, notice that if I come over here, and I'm just gonna make this darker, right? If I grab this and I make this darker, if I were to go into the Best of the Best or the haircut, both of them are gonna be dark. Which is a good thing. But what happens when you don't want that? What happens when you want different versions of it? So that's where you would use something called a virtual copy. A virtual copy is exactly the same way that you would work with these images before, it's all still referencing one thing, but if I do a right click and I go to Create Virtual Copy, you select that, Create Virtual Copy. Select that and now I can grab this file, I'll make this file brighter. I'll grab this file and I'll make this file kind of brighter, but then also really yellow. See these three files, I'm gonna hit the letter N to bring it into survey mode. One's overexposed, one underexposed, one has a super big temperature adjustment. But they're all still referencing one file. So, and most of this stuff is done, what's called parametrically. What happens is you're not really editing the raw file, all that is is just going, you know Lightroom is just really busy in the notebook. It's just like all right take that one picture and make a copy of it and then turn around and just make that look at it like this. And take this other picture and then make a copy and then do that, all of it is happening inside of the notebook. All of it is happening inside of the database. Which is great.